Mating by Norman Rush

My utopia is equal love, equal love between people of equal value, although value is an approximation for the word I want. Why is it so difficult? Assortative mating shows there has to be some drive in nature to bring equals together in the toils of love, so why even in the most enlightened and beautifully launched unions are we afraid we hear the master-slave relationship moving its slow thighs somewhere in the vicinity? It has to be cultural. In fact the closest thing I have to a religion is that this has to be cultural. I could do practically anything while he was asleep and not bother him. I wrote in my journal, washed dishes in slow motion if we hadn't gotten around to them. I was emotional a lot, privately. I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.

Book 1 of 2025, let's go!

Norman Rush's Mating follows an unnamed American academic living in Botswana. When she hears that a famously contrarian anthropologist named Nelson Denoon is building a secretive community in the desert, she shows up unannounced--after a week-long, life-threatening trek through the Kalahari Desert--to become a part of it. She becomes Denoon's lover and accomplice in the project, a female-dominated village called Tsai.

These two threads, love and the village, dominate Mating. The narrator and Denoon are, in many ways, perfect for each other: they are intellectuals and skeptics, people of both body and brain, sensual, devoted to the physical act of love, and secretly rather needy. Mating, if it does nothing else, gives a convincing sense of two people whose romance makes sense, because their thoughts and feelings seem to vibrate on the same wavelength. This love might just be the kind of kind of "equal love between people of equal value" that the narrator dreams about, but even the most equal loves exist within the context of the larger world, and this fact hangs over their heads. Tsai is meant to be a self-sustaining community, led by and for African women, and Nelson's role as leader--in fact, his presence--are only meant to be temporary. Will their love be able to survive somewhere else? Or is it only here, in Tsai, that the relationship can prosper?

Tsai is, I think, the most interesting thing about Mating. Decisions in Tsai are made my a woman-only council; necessary labor is assigned a daily value according to its urgency and can be performed by anyone in the community in exchange for credits to purchase items from a village store. Tsai is clean and orderly, both off the grid and technologically cutting-edge; it relies on the abundant sun for solar power and makes use of several practical inventions created by Denoon himself. For Denoon, Tsai represents a thumb in the eye of "development," a word that captures the ignorant meddling of NGOs in the lives of Africans. Tsai is designed to be bottom-up, to give power to the powerless. And yet, the model fails to keep out malcontents and bad actors, especially among the token number of men, who resent Denoon's position and seem to be scheming for ways to reassert their traditional dominance.

I think my favorite part of Mating is the final movement, in which Denoon sets out on an urgent and controversial mission, but ends up nearly dying in the desert before being rescued by a group of nomads. Denoon returns from his ordeal changed, more Zen-like, shorn of his humor and his cantankerousness. No one else seems to register the difference, or they like it. Only the narrator is left feeling abandoned, because, of course, there is no equal love between an ordinary woman and a Christlike Denoon, a Zen master. It's an interesting moment, because it suggests that the love we share for each other is as much about our flaws as our virtues. And it made me wonder if the same is true for our political communities, even for places like Tsai--are conflict, enmity, and friction a necessary part of the way we live with others? Utopias cannot stamp them out, but even if they did, would we want them to?

When Rain Clouds Gather by Bessie Head

Makhaya found his own kind of transformation in this enchanting world. It wasn't a new freedom that he silently worked toward but a putting together of the scattered fragments of his life into a coherent and disciplined whole. Partly life in the bush was like this. In order to make life endurable you had to quiet down everything inside you, and what you had in the end was a prison and you called this your life. It was almost too easy for Makhaya to slip into this new life. For one thing he wanted it, and for another he had started on this road, two years previously in a South African prison, the end aim in mind being a disciplined life. But the Botswana prison was so beautiful that Makhaya was inclined to make a religion out of everything found in Golema Mmidi.

Makhaya crosses the Botswanan border late in the night, fleeing from a life of violence and anger in South Africa that is only vaguely alluded to. He is adrift, and possibly dangerous, but some see in the force of his personality a hope worth cultivating: Makhaya becomes the assistant to a white Briton named Gilbert Balfour, who has dreams of reinvigorating the lives of ordinary Botswanans by teaching them new and advanced methods of agriculture. In this effort Makhaya and Gilbert are challenged by a jealous chieftain named Matenge, locked in a battle with his more powerful brother Sekoto. But they have many allies, too, like the wise elders Dinorego and Mma-Millipede, and the headstrong Paulina, who has fallen in love with the mercurial Makhaya.

In many ways When Rain Clouds Gather is a very didactic novel, though perhaps not as didactic as I expected from the way it begins. It lays out a clear vision for the future of Africa, one grounded in these new agricultural techniques, a vision that is, for the lack of a better word, technocratic. Head, who was a South African who wrote in exile in Botswana, depicts Botswana as a nation ripe for this kind of progress, unlike South Africa, where white supremacy and racial suppression still rule the day. In Botswana, the chief adversary of progress is not white supremacy but tribalism, both in the sense of old tribal enmities and a devotion to old ways. Matenge is the avatar of this "tribalism," a black African who exploits such feelings for personal power. As a result, When Rain Clouds Gather has an interesting and unusual racial politic, exemplified in the alliance between Gilbert and Makhaya--the white egghead and the charismatic black African, who acts as a conduit between Gilbert and the common people. Gilbert, in the middle of the novel, even marries Dinorego's beautiful daughter Maria, and the racial difference in the marriage is treated as unremarkable. (Which is a little wild, considering that the novel is set specifically in Botswana's year-long transition to full independence from England.)

What keeps When Rain Clouds Gather from being too didactic is the character of Makhaya. Head describes him as a refugee whose inner life is a turmoil; he churns with anger and resentment about the things he has experienced and seen--most of which are only hinted at--but who is able, through superhuman self control, to choose a life of optimism and generosity. We are told Makhaya went to prison for being found with the plans for a bomb in his pocket, something that seems unimaginable; but we are led to understand that Makhaya in white-controlled South Africa and Makhaya in Botswana are truly different people. Head never lets us see the ultimate results of Gilbert's agricultural schemes, which are hastened by a drought that decimates the area's cattle, but there is something in Makhaya that makes us believe that his mere presence can bring forth new life. Whatever quality this might be, it is the same quality that makes him frightening and a little dangerous.

With the addition of Botswana, my "countries read" list is up to 68! Nice!